What Do You Think Is Harder To Do?

[Lee]

I was just chatting with someone on AIM about studios wanting to join the 'online' world and how many of them seem to have problems in making the transition however, this guy turned around to me and said the transition from online to bricks and mortar is actually just as hard to do.

I wondered if you folks thought one particular route was harder than the other in terms of diversifying a business, is it harder to come to the 'web' from offline, or harder to go offline from the 'web' do you think?

I know we have a few community members here that have done both and was hoping to get some input from you folks to if possible as to what you found the most challenging aspect of adding a new dimension to your businesses were.

Regards,

Lee

[longboardjim]

both are equally hard without previous experience.

other than "advertisment" i've never understood why "mortar & brick" studio's want to do buisness "on-line" (interpreted: isn't the majority of their content already available in magazines & DVD? , their alittle too late in "setting the standard") and the same can be said for on-line buisnesses going "brick" (interpreted: if it ain't broke don't fix it! , it's hard in the "real-world!" , the minute you realize you can no longer work in undies and have to meet people face to face you'll run back to your computer!)
i would say "brick & mortar" to "net" would be the hardest (interpreted: more moving parts and trusting people you never meet...i'm guessing.):fool:

jim

[gaybucks_chip]

Right now, I think it would be near impossible for a new entrant in physical product (DVDs) to go into the marketplace and do well. Bricks and mortar stores already have way more product than they can handle, and generally aren't interested in new studios. Same with distributors, and to a lesser extent, online retailers.

Even many relatively established studios are being foolish and increasing the number of releases, choosing to churn out crap and sell 300 copies instead of focusing on producing and marketing a quality product and sell more copies, and that's making matters even worse.

And, of course, with a website, if you have a crappy tour, you just redo it and put the new one up, and you're done... but if you have a bad DVD cover or the authoring sucks... you probably have a garage full of that title, and it's at best a pain in the ass and at worst extremely expensive to change it out... and you don't have the luxury of cheap testing on traffic, you have to put it out and just hope it sells.

Likewise, marketing DVDs is totally different than marketing websites... it's a one-time sale, highly impulse-based, and the ways of marketing it are limited.

On the other hand, as we've seen, DVD studios have a terrible time with developing online properties... don't know how to market them, don't understand affiliate programs, often have lousy tours, and don't focus enough on retention.

I do think it might be a little easier to take a DVD brand and successfully market it online as a website than it would be to take a website brand and market it as DVDs. Both require an understanding of the marketplace, and neither is easy to pick up if you've focused on the other. At least that's our experience.

[SPACE GLIDER]

Even many relatively established studios are being foolish and increasing the number of releases, choosing to churn out crap and sell 300 copies instead of focusing on producing and marketing a quality product

That's my assessment of Disney.

[TropixxxStudios]

Chip seems to have hit it right on the nose (again.) (I can't wait to meet you someday and put a face to your intelligence.)

We have had a very sucessfull direct to customer mail order DVD line and a few titles in stores. So I guess that would qualify us as Brick & Mortor. We had virtually NO online side of our business until about a year ago, when we launched a VOD site with PPVNetworks that did amazing for us. (But was easy since they did all the design work, uploads, etc. etc.)

That sucess led us to launch our VIP area, which is in essence a traditional pay site. It has been a long hard road for us, as we have had problems understanding the online market.

We are doing much better now, and hope to do even better once we re-design the site. I think one of our successes has been the fact that we can retain our members becasue having made DVD's for 5 years, we had a ton of exclusive footage that had never been seen before. Even people that own all our DVD's would join the VIP site for some of the outtakes, etc.

We have noticed a flood in the retail DVD side of things, and seem to have been pushed aside by larger studios that put out tons of titles and seem content to only sell a few of them. My distributor told me last week that his "best selling title" so far this year (January to April) has only sold 200+ copies...but that he has more titles than ever...and stores just dont want to stock them all.

So, to answer your question, for us, it has been harder to go online, but as far as we see it, totally necessary. We still do our own catalog of mail order, but rely less and less on distributor income, and more on the income of the pay site.